Woe betide if you've made any 'problematic' statements in the past... a digital past you can never escape from.
No mention how long ago these tweets were made - could be a lifetime. Ah, the digital age.

Woe betide if you've made any 'problematic' statements in the past... a digital past you can never escape from.
No mention how long ago these tweets were made - could be a lifetime. Ah, the digital age.

You're right to put problematic in inverted commas because we're probably talking about simple opinion that has recently become frowned upon, the trans issue would be a case in point as that is a group of people that have only become untouchable in the last year or so, making waves far beyond their numbers would suggest.

The oppression hierarchies are shifting noticeably nowadays. a decade or more ago a gay guy, especially a mixed race one as this one seems to be, would have been more or less able to say what he wanted (and he probably did). Now they are becoming yesterday's victims.
This is one reason that folks on the Alt Right and alt-lite started to flourish, they stepped out of the box where one is always paranoid about expressing opinions and being called racist/homophobic/islamophobic/xenophobic/transphobic/antisemitic etc etc, and just said what they wanted. As well as boosting personal integrity, an added bonus came with it, other people appreciated these things being said too. The Left are mainly cannibalising their own here.

Yes, the search for greater victimhood continues. But how far will 'the left' go? I think calling them 'the left' is a bit of a misnomer, really.
I used to be 'left of centre' but the terms of membership have changed and now I'm classified a Nazi, apparantly. I'm starting to feel less concerned about names.

I suspect the ultimate winners will be the greatest victims to have ever existed. Once all the victims have been categorised, graded and recompensed, a single group of victims will stand head and shoulders above all else as examples of the most enduring homo sapiens ( <-- yikes! Sexist alert! What's the correct term these days?) that have suffered most. They shall be crowned the undisputed overlords and all shall love and honour them. Yippee.

Yes, the search for greater victimhood continues. But how far will 'the left' go? I think calling them 'the left' is a bit of a misnomer, really.
I used to be 'left of centre' but the terms of membership have changed and now I'm classified a Nazi, apparantly. I'm starting to feel less concerned about names.

I suspect the ultimate winners will be the greatest victims to have ever existed. Once all the victims have been categorised, graded and recompensed, a single group of victims will stand head and shoulders above all else as examples of the most enduring homo sapiens ( <-- yikes! Sexist alert! What's the correct term these days?) that have suffered most. They shall be crowned the undisputed overlords and all shall love and honour them. Yippee.

It's a poor label, but I need some sort of label to be able to discuss the subject, one can get too bogged down with the accuracy of labels to the extent that the wider subject gets overlooked.

When I use the term 'The Left' I more or less mean that which is driven/informed by Marxism, whether overtly as in the case of BAMN (Yvette Falarca's crowd) and RefuseFascism (Sunsara Taylor's crowd), covertly as in antifa (who would claim to be anarchists and decentralised) or cryptically in the case of pushy PC socialism and/or liberalism (the regressive Left)**

I think there will be no ultimate victims in this hierarchy though, it seems that it is to remain fluid and subject to fashion. the latest push to re-arrange the old hierarchies (gay, race, sex/gender) using transgender issues*** seems to be a move to keep them in flux and and experiment to see what people will tolerate without pushback. I commented this on at the Old Place when trans-issues as a game changer were first floated there around 2015, there was some questioning of this but, as predicted, most swallowed this so-called new paradigm.

** Maybe I should adopt Majid Nawaz's term "Regressive Left"

*** Notice how "trans-something" opens up a doorway (neurolinguistically speaking) for trans-humanism. This may well be the next push.

We should maybe have a thread about this. I personally think trans-humanism is about as likely as the notion in the 50's that everyone would be served by robots and flying in Jetson cars by the year 2000. i.e. load of cobblers.

We should maybe have a thread about this. I personally think trans-humanism is about as likely as the notion in the 50's that everyone would be served by robots and flying in Jetson cars by the year 2000. i.e. load of cobblers.

The promise of someday uploading your soul to a server (in and of itself a horrifying thought) is nothing more than a pipe-dream, if for no other reason that the whole idea misunderstands the true nature of mind and being. Cruel trick though it might be -- appealing to the average person's terror of death and desire for immortality -- it serves to justify all kinds of intrusive technologies, e.g. chipping people with RFID tags. I don't think a chip that interfaces with the nervous system ("neural lace") is completely far-fetched, but its benefits will be few, and it will certainly be used as an invasive means of control. The first step is already on its way: pharmaceuticals that self-report compliance.

There are elements of transhumanism that are little more than science fiction, like pouring our consciousness into a computer for storage and retrieval etc, these tend to fulfill the element of religiosity present in humans, a yearning towards something that simply provides an impetus rather than being a practical set of steps using present technology.
This has been broached to some degree though with the idea of the singularity, based upon the notion (similar to Moore's Law in computing) that, with aid of artificial intelligence, 'progress' will happen exponentially so that new technologies will inevitably become available and then those will spawn even better ones in shorter and shorter spaces of time.

There's no need for this science fiction yet though, altering ourselves mentally and physically, and away from our traditional biological roles and limitations, is at the root of transhumanism. The moving of trangenderism away from being a niche group/interest to being a more prominent element of society, one that can wield similar power to the established identity groups of sex and race, is tranhumanism-lite.. a taster.

Singer and presenter Aled Jones denies 'inappropriate' behaviour BBC News
...Responding to newspaper claims of inappropriate "messages", his spokesman said the Songs of Praise star accepted his behaviour more than a decade ago had been "occasionally juvenile"...

Some people just can't help themselves - who's next? - there are plenty to come!

Apple’s diversity chief out after outcry NYP
Denise Young Smith, who was named vice president of diversity and inclusion in May, made controversial comments last month during a One Young World Summit in Bogotá, Colombia.

“There can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blond men in a room and they’re going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation,” the inaugural diversity chief said.

This last one is the most interesting as it seems that even a black woman (it's a toss up to whether the former or latter scores highest in the oppression olympics) is rapped on the knuckles nowadays for speaking her mind . As in the OP, such groups (especially where combined) used to have a free pass, but no longer it seems.
I find it hard believe that Denise Smith was unaware of the how such remarks play in PC-land, so she may have thought that the black woman card would offer some immunity, unlike with James Damore who could play neither of those.

So, if race, sex/gender and sexuality are the markers used by yesterday's victims, I wonder what the newer ones are. I suspect that those are regarded as too simple, that more complex identities (note the many preferred gender pronouns that sprang up) are more fitting nowadays,, so complex that they may have to be decided by mysterious committees rather than being worn on the sleeve by individuals.